Back to the Casting Call

Halloween is two days away, and I'm yet again half-assing a costume that is really easy to pull off. I enjoy dressing like an idiot as much as the next person, but I never feel the desire to put much thought or effort into it. Sure, you get some major accolades for creativity and cleverness, but it's fleeting. I'd rather just be Walter Sobchak and get minor praise for it, because the the one edge I have to make the costume work is merely my girth. The rest is seriously just clothes I have lying around and spouting out well known catch-phrases.

So what am I actually DOING for Halloween, you undoubtedly ask? Watching The Walking Dead series premiere and The Venture Brother's season finale. I will be far too hungover to engage in real festivities, and that is totally fine by me. Maybe I'll even hand out candy to the three children who happen to stop by because our neighbors are afraid of us and our many guns. It's not like we keep them loaded, we're not idiots, but Boogie does loudly cock his rifles almost every night. I'd be pretty scared too. But hey, it's Halloween, you're supposed to be scared.

Notes From A Scavenger

The people of Goodsprings are too trusting. I do a handful of good deeds and they'll fucking kill for me. If only they knew how much time I spend in their houses at night. I've made a fortune stealing their mildly useful items right out from under their noses and selling it to the local shop-keep. Dumb ass even commented on how familiar his silenced .22 looked right before ringing it up.
I spent hours standing over Trudy's slumbering body, silently deciding which to use: the tire iron, switchblade, or shovel. I passed out on her floor from sleep deprivation. before I could choose. She fed me in bed for a whole day after that, thinking I had radiation poisoning.
I don't care about them, I only care about getting to New Vegas. Every night I see those bold neon lights shining over the mountains. That cock sucker who left me for dead has no idea how hard I will kill him, and how much I will enjoy it.

P.S. While you've been reading this carefully placed note in this abandoned trailer, I've been behind you deciding over the aforementioned weaponry. Turn around to find out who the lucky winner is...

Texts From Ricko

(Upon learning that UFC fighter Brock Lesner has been sponsored by Jack Links Beef Jerky)

"Bork sometimes has hunger bad. No can punch hunger. Hunger toughest enemy of all. That why BORK SMASH hunger with Jack Links Moo Cow Strips. Scare hunger away, like lightning scare Bork. Make you strong like Bork, and Bork strongest there is!"

Photo-Chop Shop

So apparently I have a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 on this computer, and only discovered it a week ago. I've had this computer for two years, so even I find this a tad unacceptable. I'm learning, slowly, to manipulate pictures and be like everyone else in the world who owns a computer. Here's my latest work of art, which to date is the most realistic depiction of my day-to-day struggle yet:

I'm eye-balling that dumb-ass soldier in the window who thinks he can fuck with me and my cohort, Ralph. Little does he know that I don't give a shit about his feelings.

At The Range: Saiga 12 Shotgun

Long-Winded Thursdays/The Decline of Credible Humans

No matter how much the schedule gets shifted, I still find myself at school for at least 12 hours straight on Thursdays. It's like an inescapable vortex of time consumption.

I should discuss topics, right? Share opinions of things I care about? This isn't LiveJournal, after all. Is that even still around? The life-cycle of those sites is about 5 years until they cease to be relevant in the mind's of internet goers. Just look at Myspace. Or Friendster. Or Xanga. Shit, I'm probably too late in the blog game myself. Blogspot will be over-taken in popularity by Blogstop.com or Blogcentral.org in a matter of months.

So I have a few hits on here, 103 to be exact, 50 of those are probably mine. I know a few friends have seen this but I suspect one or two people whom I don't know have perused through here. I find that utterly fascinating. Without even introducing myself, even in a non-formal, internet kind of way, I have given them a first impression of myself. And regardless how they feel about me, they do indeed form an opinion. It's like celebrity stalkers, who form an imaginary relationship with a person they've never met in any way, but instead gauge their personality and what they are like by interviews and appearances.

There was a dispute a few months back about a blogger who posted movie reviews and it turned out he plagiarized 90% of them. Stole them out of small newspaper publications and only ever changed small details and sentences, not even enough to convincingly make them his own. He was sued, and his blog was taken down. It's fascinating to think about because it makes sense for a person to plagiarize a book report on Atlas Shrugged because A.) It's 1500 pages long and B.) Ayn Rand is a terrible writer and her ideas are bullshit. But how hard is it to pay $10 ($7.50 for a matinee), sit down and watch the movie yourself then go write your opinion? Even if you can't really critique it as well as professional movie critics, how much of a burden is it to just write it out and do the very simple leg-work?
I mean, I get it, he wanted people to believe he was an expert on movies and get respect for that, but in an age when it's so easy to pretend to be someone different on the internet it's far more of a commodity to just be yourself. And honestly, real movie-goers don't want to read a professional critique of a film they're interested in, they want someone relate-able who's just like them to give them the skinny. I don't give a shit what Roger Ebert thinks about District 9 (amazing film), but I do want to know what my friends think. Why? Because we can talk about it. I can't call up Roger Ebert to debate films with him, or even email him for that matter.
I guess my point is that there is no point. The internet is a safe haven for the self-conscious to build a better version of themselves. Is it worth it? You tell me. The way I see it, if it's so hard being yourself, how much easier will it be to uphold the illusion of a different you? That blogger lost thousands of dollars and his reputation just because he felt other people's words were better than his own.Seems like a pretty hefty price to pay when he could've just gone to the movies at his leisure and blogged about his cats or something instead.

Imaginary Cops on Methamphetamines

So, my dreams are weird. I mean fucking bizarre. David Lynch would think I'm crazy if he knew what my dreams were like. I can analyze them to a point, figuring which parts coincide with the activities and experiences of the previous days, maybe something relating to abandonment issues, etc. The rest I just leave alone. It gets far too bat-shit crazy for even a clinically insane person to try and rationalize.

Last night's dream was oddly realistic, in the sense that the people and places were familiar. The plot, however, decidedly not so. The main part I remember was one of my former classmates, a police officer no less, coming to my apartment. There was a reason for this, I guess we had a project to discuss. Either way, he's flying high on crystal meth. In the dream I just assume this, I have no real evidence of him using drugs at all, it just makes the most sense to my dream self. So he's talking to me about something, and between sentences he violently flips over pieces of furniture in my apartment, including my bed. He's not aggressive towards me, it's like he's punctuating his points by flinging the objects aside. And the whole time I'm trying to assure my room mate that my classmate is just on meth, and he's not usually like this. As if that would quell his fears of this giant, drug induced He-Man destroying our living space. My concern isn't of the goings on, per se, but of trying to sustain my credibility as a room mate.

Flash forward in the dream because there is no chronological link between scenes, of course. I'm on a hike/jog in San Francisco with my editing teacher and some classmates. I try to bring up my concern for the meth using fellow classmate, and my teacher has some wisdom to drop on the issue, but it's all but forgotten when we arrive at the Moulin Rouge. Or it feels like that, there are can-can dancers and colorful drag queens everywhere but I'm assured by everyone that it's not the Castro. Then my old friend Eric shows up and acts like a dick to everyone for no fucking reason. End of dream, because I am never allowed closure even in my subconscious.

So I can see the deeper message of my self-conscious desire to keep my friends from hating each other, that one's obvious. The rest is beyond me, and frankly I've made it this far not looking for meaning in my dreams. It serves no real purpose, because it's only relevant to me in theory. If my dreams could make me a better person, I'd just sleep the rest of my life.

Outdoor Photos by an Indoors Kind of Guy

So I finally took my camera out hiking and took some pretty epic photos (by I'm-Not-A-Photographer standards). Take a look-see:

 Major props to the moon for being in the right spot at the right time.

 Terrible lighting, I know, but this corridor always creeps me out, even during the day.

 I love the exposure here. It looks like the sky is on fire. Awesome.

 Shortly after the creepy corridor of Tim Burton trees is the creepy bridge that hides God knows what.

 Again, moon, you rule.

 I concur, random suburban graffiti artist, I concur.

So yeah, not a bad set considering I pretty much never take pictures despite having a fully capable full sensor DSLR to do it with.

A Convenient Coincidence

So I was planning on ditching my morning class today and making an excuse, as students are want to do, when I get a text from a classmate telling me it's been canceled. Hmm...interesting. I rarely come across odd coincidences like this, where chaos theory works for someone, as opposed to killing everything in sight (like Amores Perros). And for the ill informed community college students: No, this is not an ironic occurrence, go look up the meaning of that word.

So, with the few extra hours before my next class, I decided to go to Namaste for the lunch buffet, because I am fiendishly addicted to it. The fact that I saw a cockroach in their bathroom doesn't seem to sway my opinion. I know, disgusting, but my fatty mind rationalizes that, "Hey, it's in the bathroom. The kitchen's over there. We're good to go!." On second thought, that is pretty ridiculous and gross, I'll just go to Giant Chef. It's cheaper anyways.

So I'm still not entirely sure what this blog will be about, I seem to be treating it like a lengthy Facebook status update, as I previously mentioned. If I have totally awesome opinions about things I will most certainly share them. For now, I eat. Here's a bear that wants to hug you:

Not To Be Transliterated: In the beginning...things...started

Not To Be Transliterated: In the beginning...things...started: "I haven't blogged in a while, so I'm rusty. If there is such a thing as becoming rusty at sharing thoughts on the internet in more than thre..."

In the beginning...things...started

I haven't blogged in a while, so I'm rusty. If there is such a thing as becoming rusty at sharing thoughts on the internet in more than three sentences (thank you Facebook status updates). So I came to a realization yesterday, while wasting hours looking at the same sites over and over again. And I do mean that, I seriously will sit here and keep refreshing my email in between re-checking other sites like IGN and IMDB, like some fucking Alzheimer's patient. I came to the conclusion that despite my laziness and refusal to admit that I'm an anti-social internet geek, I should probably start doing more with my time online than clicking these six tabs over and over again. So, I decided to start up a new YouTube account and do video game commentaries, my rationing being that there is a cavalcade of Call of Duty montages and ultimate kill streak videos which serve no purpose other than to feed the uploader's ego, but not so many from average gamers who aren't particularly gifted at quick scoping and camping. So, I figured I could unabashedly showcase my average skills with commentaries because hell, I'm not doing much with my time otherwise. I mean yeah, I go to school, I write, and I should definitely be doing more work on my web series (and I will). But I spend so much time bored wishing I had something, anything, productive to do that involves my internet addiction.

And then there's this. This blog, right here. Why not blog? I make fun of it all the time but to be perfectly frank I have no shame in sharing my odd thoughts with people on a regular basis, so why not let the other people in the world in on my crazy, eh?

I'd be remiss not to mention what I did today, right? I went to the gun range and shot a Saiga 12 shotgun. It looks like this: 

Mean mother-fucker, I must say. My arm is still rather sore. But, on the plus side, I vented A LOT of frustration shooting that thing. I felt pretty relaxed afterwords.

So that's it for today, I'll leave you with a photo I took months ago of a plant outside my apartment: